Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
This is one of my absolutely favorite pieces of spoken word. I present it here as a tribute to Paviter Singh and his woordle mastery. What do our changing speech patterns of say about our (de)evolution as a species. Should we be concerned? Would Thomas Jefferson understand us? Should he? Is that even a desirable goal, or just nostalgic and linguistically conservative?
I went down to NYC on Friday for several interviews and had the opportunity to show the folks at Teaching Matters how Voicethread might be used to extend a traditional language arts lesson. Teaching Matters provides tech support, curriculum and consulting to New York schools. They are working together with Computers for Youth to implement a large Commerce Department grant to extend broadband access to 34,000 underserved families in New York and other metropolitan areas. So they asked me specifically to include in my lesson some elements that could leverage that access.
In a lesson on observation and inference, I posted the Winslow Homer painting Gulf Stream on Voicethread and then asked my “students” to comment on it, first making observations, then drawing inferences about the action in the painting. This is just one mockup frame in a short lesson, but you get the idea.
I see it as a potentially powerful tool for activities like this, especially since you can sketch out specific observations. There is also a certain intimacy to the voice that is unlike written comments. One can convey so much more- surprise, warmth, skepticism, etc. Perhaps it feels too intimate? I was more reluctant to comment on classmates Voicethreads that I didn’t know as well than if I had been writing. That maintains a distance.
Sure the interface can be clunky when it’s embedded in a blog. Sometimes the mic doesn’t work. But it’s a very cool tool with some interesting pedagogic affordances. A tool that kids and schools in New York and other places can only use if we address digital exclusion.
Van DeVelde from Wikipedia- The Choke Artist as Public Persona
This post has been a while coming. I have been really keen on Jonah Lehrer’s book, How We Decide. Coming from the educational technology world where it’s difficult to find people who can bridge the language barrier between technologists and teachers, I appreciate an expert who can talk to me like I’m a six year old. He does a really nice job of turning the sometimes esoteric language of neuroscience into readable, grounded (or in flight) examples.
And yet, occasionally he simplifies too much. Here I’m echoing Matt Shapiro’s earlier critique of the book. The meltdown of Jean Van de Velde at the 1999 British Open at Carnoustie is oversimplified to the point where the message may be lost. Lehrer states “…after seven errant shots, (he) finish(ed) the round. But it was too late. Van de Velde had lost the British Open” (137). Not true. His seven on the 18th pushed him into a tie with Justin Leonard and Paul Lawrie. Lawrie won the 4 hole playoff. The point here is that following this epic meltdown, Van de Velde persisted, regrouped and played competitively on the ensuing holes. He was, in fact, remarkably resilient. This detail is difficult to find on the public record. One needs to dig quite a bit to discover anything on the playoff. The stories tend to end with the triple bogey. This says more about us and how we characterize failure and choking than about the professionals who do occasionally choke. In this case, Lehrer participates in the weird mythologizing of failure.
“The meltdown” has become the public face of Jean Van de Velde. When you look him up in Wikipedia, the picture above appears. Take a second, click it and blow it up to have a look. He looks, literally, lost in the woods, staring at an impossible lie. Note the dejection. He is not even carrying a club, as though the situation he faces is so bad there is not a club in the world that can help him. This photo is not from the Open Championship at Carnoustie, but it is how we think of him now.
Lehrer goes even further, engaging in a dissection of Van de Velde’s swing on the tee at 18 saying he “jerked back his club” in an “awkward” swing. This is the worst sort of hindsight transference. The video of the entire hole is here and his tee shot actually looks loose, relaxed and lovely. If this is the moment of choke, except for the result, it is invisible. But more importantly, the ultimate reality of Van de Velde is quite different. Sure he never again contended for a major title as Lehrer points out, but neither did Paul Lawrie who actually won the Championship. He was, however, remarkably sanguine about the loss. He seemed more distressed by the fact that people were upset with him, stating.
“Maybe it was asking too much for me. Maybe I should have laid up. The ball was laying so well. … Next time, I hit a wedge, and you all forgive me?”
Most interestingly, in the winter of 1999, Van de Velde returned to the course to play the hole using only a putter. On the third try, he bested his tournament score of a seven with a six. He hits the ball off the tee with the putter over 200 yards, then plays over the water. It’s brilliant and hilarious and touching because it speaks to resiliency. You must watch it.
Perhaps this is the Jean Van de Velde we should remember, hugging his children, basking in his own oddball victory of revisitation, having a great time on the otherwise silent, cold 18th green. “It is not the course that our struggle is against. The enemy is us.”
Both this and the entry below are assignments for the class Universal Design for Learning. We are checking out the affordances of a variety of different media and content delivery systems, in this case Voicethread.
Let’s slide this one up here as a straightout neurological mystery. Derek Paravicini is autistic, blind, in some ways profoundly disabled, yet plays a mean piano and has an extraordinary ability to memorize music from a single listening. He is incapable of telling his right hand from his left, remembering his name or what he had for breakfast, but he can play Beethoven in the style of Dave Brubeck if asked. Now this is one of those stories the media loves, and with good reason, because it makes us feel weirdly transcendent. For those who are inclined to muse about God, they find commenting on stories like this irresistible. What there is remarkably little of, at least in my searching, is any sort of significant discussion of what is actually happening inside the savant’s brain. The extent of the “analysis” on Paravicini is that since he’s blind, he’s been able to devote more neural attention to music. That’s it? How is it that brain damage transmutes into a very particular type of genius (if we feel comfortable calling it that)? Surely someone knows something on this topic? Who’s doing the FMRIs here? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?
Myelin (white matter) volume by age. Looks like it's all downhill for me.
To follow up on my previous post, the more you know about brain development, the less it makes sense to send teenagers to war. This story from NPR a while back is a perfect indicator of that. Frances Jensen, a pediatric neurologist at Children’s Hospital in Boston was trying to figure out what made her teenage sons so whacked out. Turns out it’s a function of the connectivity of the rest of the brain to the frontal lobes. Teenagers have significantly less myelin sheathing in their brains than older people do. That means signals flow less freely, or, as the article somewhat crudely puts it, their frontal lobes are not as well connected as older people’s are. Since the frontal lobes are the site of much higher order cognition (ability to recognize future consequences resulting from current actions, to choose between good and bad actions (or better and best), override and suppress unacceptable social responses, etc), this intuitively makes sense in explaining teen decision making. This is a well researched neuro-developmental stage.
That said, the pace at which young people make connections in the brain far exceeds others. If one looks at addiction as a form of learning, that makes teens much more susceptible to adopting addictive behaviors. Full development of neural insulation for maximum connection of the motor cortex to the frontal lobes doesn’t occur until the mid-twenties. This is sort of a double whammy for teens- high brain activity but less higher order thinking. Therefore teens are both more likely to encounter/create traumatic events and more susceptible to psychological damage from exposure to them.
At least with regard to the military, we stand today on slightly firmer footing than in past wars. The average age of a GI in Vietnam was around 19, a function of the draft. In Iraq and Afghanistan today it is about 27.
Meanwhile, I’m peaking on the prevalence of my myelin sheathing. Brain function will be lower and slower tomorrow than it is today. Time to load up on ginko and ginseng.
The bedroom of FIRST LT. BRIAN N. BRADSHAW, ARMY Killed June 25, 2009, Kheyl, Afghanistan; roadside bomb. AGE: 24 HOMETOWN: Steilacoom, Wash
What if we could manipulate our brains to blunt or minimize the trauma of warfare? Would that be a good thing? And if so, for whom? Watch this video, then let’s talk.
We will soon be engaged in the longest war in the history of our nation, in the “graveyard of empires”- Afghanistan. Most of us, I suspect, feel fairly removed from that war, myself included. For some reason, the American people have recently decided that things are looking up in Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan enter my consciousness viscerally only occasionally. When I moved into my apartment, David, the guy who came to hook up my cable, told me how he had been recalled from active duty when his younger brother, 19, had been killed by an IED in Khandahar. Sitting in a class at the Kennedy School this winter discussing the limits of human morality, a student who was a former Marine stated that anyone who has been to war comes back thinking far less of him or herself as a person capable of translating their moral code into action than when they went in. It is difficult to imagine the experience behind that statement, but I know it’s true. This Saturday, I will attend a going away party for my cousin Michael who will deploy to Afghanistan next month. Now it’s at my doorstep.
Occasionally, a piece of journalism will capture the incredible loss and tragedy undergirding this war effort. This photo-essay by Ashley Gilbertson is one, and this report by the brilliant Dexter Filkins is another.
The degree to which the Bloggingheads miss the point is stunning and depressing. It’s not about how the US is perceived but about the actual loss involved, the human tragedy of war and how we decide to enter it. The ethical issues involved in pharmaceutically “enhancing” soldiers neural networks should not be subsumed by a discussion of public relations. The book they are discussing is Jonathan Moreno’s Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. The Defense Department has become a major funder of neuroscience research. Soldiers who take beta-blockers might be less likely to experience post traumatic stress disorder. Drugs may alleviate fear, creating “super soldiers” or as the Bloggingheads describe them “less than human ” warriors. Naturally the Defense Department wants to know. To cope as a society, should we all take drugs? And dispense them to our enemies, civilian and military alike? We should be talking about this. Aggression still aggression, and death is still death, isn’t it? But only a few of us are in possession of the terrible secret of what it actually looks like. Is it more important to remember or to forget? What are the societal, political and spiritual implications of altering the wartime brain? If we are not mourning sometimes, are we truly paying attention? And if not, what are the consequences?
Richard Branson, dyslexic, with Audrina Partridge and Lauren Conrad. Dyslexia never looked so good.
At a presentation by Scott Hartl and Ron Berger of the Expeditionary Learning Schools network today the question came up “What assessments are people looking to the most to measure your progress?” Scott noted several then referenced the fact that ELS is working on deploying an assessment to measure what people foolishly call “soft skills” – the ability to apply sustained effort, motivation, engagement. Now, I don’t have any data on this, but I’m guessing that assessment will be a pretty strong indicator of success in college. It reminded me of this article from the Times a few years back. It details a study finding that more than a third of small business owners describe themselves as dyslexic. That far outpaces the roughly 10% of students in schools who are diagnosed as dyslexic. By way of contrast, only 1% of corporate managers are dyslexic. The author of the study, Julie Logan from the Cass Business School in London, notes that dyslexics are uniquely positioned to succeed in business because they “are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.” That includes acquiring strong people skills like knowing whom to trust and to whom to delegate, exceeding in oral communication and mastering problem solving. Never mind that after struggling academically at school, many are determined to prove themselves in the marketplace. Interestingly, the numbers are not as high in England, a tribute Logan says to the success of school-based interventions in the US. Tip of the hat, US teachers. Yet another example of the brain as a compensatory organ, always seeking a way to do what it needs to. The brain is, in Jonah Lehrer’s words “enthusiastically pluralistic.”
I was interested in Jennifer Bartecchi’s post on the professor making a big show of smashing up the laptop in his Chem class or whatever it was. One might infer that he is not a fan of adaptive technology or UDL generally. Maybe we can agree his method is a little wacko. But this touches more seriously on our discussion last class of whether or not the tools might actually impinge on learning by creating an interface which interferes with the interface between student and student or student and teacher. Which is not to say that these tools are not necessary, but the deployment of them needs to be carefully balanced with the alteration they bring to the learning dynamic, both group and one to one. As I sit in the back of certain classes, I look at an array of computers open before me. A few people are taking notes. More on average are checking email, sports scores, updating facebook status. That means significantly less participation, fewer voices in the mix. The reality there is that those who chose to go that route are diminishing the experience of the class as a whole. If it’s serving as a necessary tool, by all means use it, right? If it’s a distraction, why why not drop it? The most dynamic classes I’ve been in at the Ed School have been the ones where profs said “Leave it in the bag.” Maybe people are struggling but it doesn’t seem like it. John Henry used a sledgehammer, so did the comedian Gallagher. Same tool, very different results. What is the intention involved? Now how about this student?
